White House Advisers Tell Obama to Share Airwaves for Broadband

By Todd Shields -
Jul 20, 2012

Federal agencies should share
airwaves with commercial users to ease a shortage of frequencies
and help meet surging demand from wireless smartphones and other
mobile devices, a White House advisory panel said.

President Barack Obama should have U.S. agencies identify
twice as much spectrum for shared use as he directed in a 2010
memorandum setting mobile-computing growth as a national
priority, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and
Technology said in a letter and report issued today.

Carriers led by Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. wireless
provider, and No. 2 AT&T Inc. (T) have pushed the government to
devote more airwaves to wireless high-speed Internet, or
broadband, as they seek to handle data traffic that has more
than doubled four years in a row.

Today’s recommendation signals a U.S. shift from granting
companies exclusive use of airwaves vacated by federal agencies,
and toward having frequency bands accommodate demands from
multiple users.

Mobile carriers have said they prefer to have swaths of
airwaves they control.

“Full ownership of the spectrum has proven over time to be
the best model,” AT&T Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson said at June 1 conference. “Spectrum sharing models,
it’s really hard for somebody like us to control network
quality.”

Doubling Airwaves

Obama in 2010 pledged to almost double the airwaves
available for wireless devices such as smartphones and tablet
computers by making another 500 megahertz available over 10
years.

U.S. mobile providers are assigned 409.5 megahertz for
commercial use, according to CTIA-The Wireless Association.
Members of the Washington-based trade group include AT&T,
Verizon Wireless, No. 3 carrier Sprint Nextel Corp. (S) and the
fourth-largest, T-Mobile USA Inc.

The 500-megahertz plan has been progressing slowly, and it
can be prohibitively expensive to move federal agencies aside as
relocation costs mount, the White House advisory council said in
today’s report. It recommended the federal government find 1,000
megahertz for shared use.

As an example of possible ways to share, the report said
some users could operate in airwaves and cease when primary,
federal users begin to emit signals. In another example, devices
can automatically switch to different airwaves when a higher
priority use takes place, the report said. Or devices could use
spectrum in one place that is reserved for government uses in
other locations, the report said.

Defense Spectrum

Defense agencies are the largest users of federal spectrum,
holding about 37 percent of airwaves assigned to U.S. users, the
White House panel said in its report.

The advisory group issuing today’s report was appointed by
the president to augment the science and technology advice
available to him from inside the White House. Members include
Google Inc. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt; Mark Gorenberg, a
managing director of San Francisco-based investors Hummer
Winblad Venture Partners; and Craig Mundie, chief research and
strategy officer at Microsoft Corp.

Congress in February approved auctions of unused television
airwaves for use by wireless services, another step aimed at
alleviating the spectrum shortage. The Federal Communications
Commission is working to devise auction rules.

Blair Levin, a former FCC official who’s now a fellow at
the Washington-based policy group Aspen Institute, has said the
auctions may reap 60-to-80 megahertz of airwaves, compared with
120 anticipated by the agency. Broadcasters can choose whether
to sell their airwaves in the voluntary auction.